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One Little Instability

My social life has taken a backseat for the past few months due to work. I went from having no job at all for two months (I should probably count my blessings that the unemployment was relatively short) to having more hours than I know what to do with, simply because I have coworkers who do not work. And then things got worse.

One coworker who transferred in from another branch of the company gave us some hope. She knew the job already, at least. She turned out to be lazy and much too argumentative. Before long she was that one coworker that we drew straws to figure out who would have to put up with her for the night. And this wasn’t the worst of it. Said coworker became increasingly whiny and attention-seeking, and made her (false) complaints all the way up to the corporate offices to cost one employee his job and threaten another. And despite documented thefts and walking off of the job more than once, she is still employed.

What have we learned from this? Two things: One unstable individual can make some substantial waves, and some characters seem to escape karma.

A blog post for The Bitter Baker will be up in the near future regarding poor employees and the tendency of companies to enable them. I’ve neglected that blog for far too long. But that’s not a rant to share here.

This story ties in to a favorite theme of mine, that the bad guys don’t always lose. Greater influence and cutthroat companions can undermine a “good guy” faster than you can say “justice!” It isn’t motivations or purity that decide the outcome of a battle, but the actions each side takes. One threat of a lawsuit can be enough to scare a company into submission, no matter how unfounded an allegation can be. This is something one never wants to encounter in real life, but necessary in fiction. It creates the conflict that drives a story forward. It makes stories such as A Song of Ice and Fire so popular. It’s also a hell of a lot more interesting than a story about the hero who has everything handed to him.